SPOILER WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
This is a story all about how some kids' lives got flipped, turned upside down, when a guy who once cut a rope while mountain climbing to save himself at the expense of 3 other people traps them all at a remote cabin they are of course all going out to visit as kids like to do, and forces them to kill each other or be killed by him. How's that for a sentence?
Yes, once again the teens (well, 20-somethings - they so often play teens I'm not actually sure which they are supposed to be in this movie) find the idea of a cabin in the middle of nowhere to be the most delightful notion since being murdered one by one. Though the two experiences are generally interchangeable.
So, huh. This movie is, according to a bunch of the reviewers on Netflix (I like to check sometimes!), full of twists. What they mean is that the people you think are dead come back and kill other people. And that does happen quite a few times, but I'm not willing to call it a twist. It's just kind of eh. Similarly, the movie actually ends with a final revelation that some have called a twist, but it was completely what I expected, and unlike an actual twist, it didn't change your view on anything you had seen. It's more like just another piece of irrelevant information really. I was pretty mad about that, because I'm a sucker for twists. As soon as I saw a review that said "the final twist was a real head-spinner", I couldn't just go without knowing what it was. I guess my head is just screwed on tighter than some, because the only spinning was me shaking my head.
As you can probably guess by now, this movie didn't do much for me. It was okay, there was a level of interest to see who would snap and decide to kill who. But it just had nothing fresh or anything to get excited about.
I do see two other notes I took while watching: first is that it was kind of refreshing to see the "put down the camera and stop filming everything already!" scene in a movie with no found footage element at all. It was just an annoying guy who liked to film people. I guess those must exist! The other note, I don't quite remember writing, but it reads "White people all look the same, but they're so hard to kill." Good advice for life.
In the end, we have a body count of 7, plus 3 more in the past, and I rate this a disappointing
2 out of 5 Gas Balloons.
I just drew the first thing I remembered from the movie - an axe stuck in a stump. But don't look a gift axe in the mouth, because there's probably a bear trap around it (not pictured).
